How do critics paint the portrait of market man? They accept his pursuit of food and shelter but find him excessive in pursuit of ever more goods and services, as well as money for its own sake, to the near exclusion of things of mind and spirit.
He is small-minded, petty in calculation of advantage. He is more cunning than thoughtful or wise. He thinks invidiously. His moral code, insofar as he follows one, consists less of the rules of good conduct derived from the Greek-Judeo-Christian or Eastern traditions than of the self-serving rules of an aggressive game.
He is an egoist, yet not skillfully so. His narrow pursuit of market advantage makes him crass and shallow. He is insensitive to the costs to himself and his family of the pattern of living he has chosen or drifted into. He does not recognize his loneliness, nor how difficult he finds it to think "we" instead of "I."
I recognize the portrait. But granted that it is a face often encountered, is it typical? And if typical, typical of what? Not necessarily of the market system.
At least since Plato, a procession of philosophers and theorists has roughly distinguished two forms of peaceful and cooperative human association. One is through the multilateral relations of kinship, shared values and affection. The other is through heavily unilateral relations and formal organizations like state, bureaucracy and corporation. In the last 300 years in Western Europe and North America--fewer years in some other parts of the world--they believe they have seen societies move away from the first and toward the second.
Although the transformation coincides with the rise of the market system and almost certainly alters personality and culture, it does not permit inference about the responsibility of the market system. For the transformation also coincides with industrialization, technological innovation, urbanization and bureaucratization. It also coincides, although usually after a time lag, with the rise of political democracy. If it is agreed that these movements fed on each other, just how does one sort out cause and effect? Clearly industrialization, urbanization, technological innovation and bureaucratic organizations took off on a track largely independent of the market system in the Soviet Union. Hence the market system cannot be credited or debited.
In the transformation from a world of community toward a world of purposive organizations, the market system is usually seen as belonging to the later world but not the earlier. Something is wrong. Market relations take the form of multilateral, widely diffused interchanges among most adults. They are not at all limited to the relations, heavily unilateral, among participants in a formal organization.
The contrast between the two forms of society would be more demonstrably valid if 300 years had brought us all the way. We would then see an unmistakable contrast between traditional community and the tragic terminal of a homogeneous society coordinated largely by the state. But except for the fascist and communist world, the change did not go anywhere near that far. It turned out that there was a third alternative: the market system. It provides large-scale social coordination beyond the possibilities of community yet does not require the subordination of humankind to purposive organizations.
That the market system pushes participants toward materialism is usually a clumsy way to say that it pushes them toward the pursuit of money.
The great instrument for interaction in market society is money. Who can deny that in market systems people revolve around it? The question is what to make of our central pursuit of money income. Money is on some counts a great liberator, opening up vast choices; spending is the route to an extraordinarily wide array of ends. Money is of course limited in its capacity to allow people to win friends, find inner peace or achieve immortality. Yet people spend money even for those purposes. They make a contribution to their college in exchange for a name on a building; some people have even tried to arrange to be frozen and then awakened in a thousand years. In market systems, so many aspirations can be approached with money that people prudently pursue it in advance of plans for using it, saving it in order to hold possibilities open. So far, however, this is a picture of wide-ranging choice and rationality rather than of corruption of personality and culture.
But it is perhaps only a short step to letting the pursuit of money displace all the other alternatives. It becomes possible to go through life as though through a tunnel. The pitfall in such a hypothesis is that life in a tunnel may be in actual fact infrequent rather than common. Good survey research seems to indicate that for most people in market societies, aspirations for a challenging job, friendships and the pleasures of children and family rank higher than do aspirations for more money or more market products. The research is a major challenge to the common view that the market system corrupts our aspirations.
Perhaps people commit as much time as they do to the pursuit of money and purchasables because it is easier to pursue aspirations through the market system than through the state or civil society. If one wants one's municipality to convert some vacant land to a public park, one faces a formidable and time-consuming task. One must enlist allies, will almost certainly make enemies, and will often fail. If one wants a closer set of family ties or a broader congeniality among acquaintances, one may not know how to go about achieving it. In contrast, in the market system one simply buys what one wants or, lacking the money, puts the aspiration aside. One may behave this way because one is thoughtful and clearheaded, not because one's aspirations have been distorted by market life.
These alternative interpretations illustrate the difficulty of appraising market-system impact. Perhaps the very ease with which people turn to market transactions to pursue their aspirations is seductive and puts a stamp on the society. It becomes a society of people alive to what they can obtain effortlessly from the market and dead to what collective choice will yield only uncertainly. Participation in community or collectivity declines and people become, as Aristotle would say, less human. Do we know that much? We know that rates and kinds of participation in community differ from society to society and that they change over time. But we do not know that the differences are attributable to the market system or that they make us less human.
Charles E. Lindblom, '37, is Sterling Professor emeritus of economics and political science at Yale. Excerpt from The Market System: What It Is, How It Works, and What To Make of It (Yale University Press, 2001) reprinted by permission. ©2001 Yale University
